Drones, NFL, and How Streaming Isn’t Always Reliable

In response to the growing concerns of consumer drones crowding the airways above us, the FAA has now released plans to require everyone to register their drone. The idea is that if a drone causes an aircraft to go down, or if it impedes the flight path of an aircraft, that the FAA can track it down to see who caused it.

To go even further, the FAA is charging $5 for registration to the people who are buying drones or already have them. If those who own drones choose not to register them, they could be faced with up to $250,000 in fines.

In other news, the NFL is auctioning off the rights to broadcast Thursday night football games to whoever wants to purchase them. Theoretically a company like Google or Apple could purchase those rights and stream those games through the internet if they win the auction.

However, the dependability of live-streaming an NFL game online still seems murky. A football game in London was available for live-stream online to the public, and 15 million people tuned in to watch that game. Now, bigger games could have five times that amount of people watching, which could cause problems with streaming and a short delay every now and then. Whether the NFL is ready for that type of jump remains to be seen.

The problem is there’s so many components in streaming, from the servers that people connect with to the pipeline that connects your home to the internet backbone, and an issue could arise at any one of those junctures.

There’s just simply not enough bandwidth to support the amount of people streaming a major event like an NFL game, which goes to show that the internet isn’t a promised land where we can get whatever we want just yet.

For more information on this topic, call us at (831) 753 -7677 or email us at info@alvareztg.com.